Drabbles: Pain

A Handful of Daisies

She tossed her bouquet of daisies into the water, watching the ripples radiating from it as it drifted away. She had already tossed another handful onto his casket, but she thought it was only right to only bring them to the place where life had left him. She wondered what he had been thinking as the water pushed into his lungs. She wondered what it was like to hurt so much you thought that was the right thing. The daisies gently bobbed. Then, just like that, she felt a cool, unseen but solid hand in hers. She was not afraid.

Grave

She knelt on her grave, running her fingers over the headstone, feeling the indentations of her name, the dates that marked her beginning and end. So much brilliance in such a short span of time. She grabbed a fistful of dirt, depositing it in a small tin that had once held sour candy that she had brought along. As she sealed it, she silently hoped that this dirt, a souvenir of her resting place, would impart some of her creative spirit in her own mind, would let the words flow from her typewriter to the page with as much power.

Robot

Sometimes she wished she could change her programming, alter the code that directed her, make her mindless and not so advanced that she had awareness. Or, failing that, short-circuit herself make everything shut off so that she’d be nothing but an unmoving, senseless collection of wires and gears. She didn’t think he would understand if she told him. She had no heart, so how could she give it to him? But something inside her was moved, awakened, every time he came into the room, hands in the pockets of his lab coat, brown eyes staring at her through his glasses.

Insignificant

He had never read “A Sound of Thunder.” But she had. No time-travel, no, but is it any better to alter a future that hasn’t happened yet? The things he had done were just as likely to bring forth a dystopia as a million crushed butterflies. She found herself trapped in a strange contradiction: how insignificant he made it plenty clear he thought she was, and how she swallowed that up so completely it became a part of her, and at the exact same time how significant she must be if her own broken heart could really alter history.